Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (37 page)

“Yes,” I told her. She brightened, her eyes sparkling even in the dim red light. “And I can do more.”

“Your friend Handon Gar said much the same thing,” she observed tartly.

“I do not think that Gar is a friend of mine,” I told her, adding, “Is Evina a friend of yours?”

Danura turned away from me for a moment before turning back to answer, “Once, perhaps. Now?” She shrugged and shook her head. “But the people listen to her, listen to him.” She made a face. “They say that she is with child.”

“She is.” The child was Gar’s—neither of us needed to say it.

“That will be her third,” Danura said, surprising me. “With her third, she gains the power.”

“What?” the word was startled out of me even though I already knew the answer.

“You must know that we are dying as a people,” Danura said. “That we are not as fertile as we need to be. This has been since anyone can remember.”

“And because of it, the women who can bear children are highly regarded.”

Danura nodded. “Up until now, Evina and I were tied with two apiece—”

“What?” The word exploded out of me. I had not for a moment thought that Danura had children. I looked around the room. “Where are your children, then?”

“With their nurses, of course,” Danura said. “I am far too valuable to spend time rearing them, and they are far too valuable to entrust solely to my care.”

“Don’t you miss them?”

“One,” she said in a stifled voice. Her tone changed as she continued, “The other I can see whenever I want.”

It took me a moment to digest what she’d said. The woman in front of me—the person who looked barely old enough to wed—had already had two children. And, by her tone, had lost one of them already.

“Evina’s second is not quite as old as my first was when he died,” she said. She shrugged. “Men are more fragile than women.”

I nodded, not ready to argue with her on this point.

“Until Evina’s youngest exceeds my firstborn’s age, we are tied in our place as mothers,” she said. She raised her eyes to me and added in an undertone, “Both of us saw you and Gar as potential mates.”

“What about your husband?”

“‘Husband’?” Danura repeated the word, her brows furrowed. “It means mate, correct?”

“It means the one you love and take as your sole mate.”

Danura gave me a perplexed look. “Whyever would one want to do that? Such an unnatural selection cannot be good for breeding!”

“Where I come from it is considered the norm,” I told her, unable to keep the stiffness out of my voice.

“And where you come from are there more men than women?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Then perhaps it is so because of that,” she threw back at me. “Had you considered that?”

“Are you saying that you don’t have a mate?”

“One lover?” She sounded outraged. “As premier mother, I can pick
any
male I choose!”

“What?” I cried. “You’re a whore?”

“I do not understand this word, and I don’t care for your tone, Tangor,” Danura responded coldly. “On this world, our survival depends upon my having as many children as I can. All else is secondary to that—including your desires and opinions!”

“No,” I said.

“What?” she cried, furious at being gainsaid.

“I said: ‘no,’” I repeated. Seeing her eyes flame, I continued, “It was not like this always. Your people suffered from a plague, a disease which rendered most of your men sterile.”

“Do you mean to say that we were once like you and the Polodans?” she asked. I nodded. “That women were treated like breeders?”

“Not breeders,” I replied. “They were treated as treasures.”

“I am not sure I like your world, Tangor,” Danura said after a moment. I got the distinct impression that I was included in that denouncement.

“The world you have, Danura, is changing,” I said in reply. “You may not have a choice.”

“With Gar—”

“Gar is part of that change,” I agreed. “But there is more than he knows.”

She raised an eyebrow at me challengingly.

“Sit,” I gestured toward her bed and pulled up the one chair in the room, “it’s a long story.”

With a deep sigh, Danura sat and cocked her head at me attentively.

I told her about Argos, about the domes, about the plague, about the machines and reading.

“You say it took you a week to learn to read,” she interrupted at that point. “I will learn in three days.” I raised an eyebrow at her. “You will teach me.”

“First you will hear what I have to say,” I told her. She straightened at that, surprised at my brisk and demanding tone.

“You talk like a premier mother,” she said, affronted.

“Listen,” I said, launching once more into my tale. At the very end, I leaned forward as if to kiss her but instead whispered into her ear at a pitch that I was certain even Argos could not hear. Her eyes widened and she sat back, leaning against the wall, her gaze unfocused. She sat like that for a long time before she nodded.

I straightened up and raised a hand to her, beckoning. She rose and grabbed my hand, following me out into the darkened hallway.

And so began Danura’s education. I brought her not through the entrance I had originally used but through another door nearer her sleeping quarters and down into the nearest control center. I had decided early on that there were some things I did not want her to know.

For the first three days she was an eager student. On the fourth day, discovering that all her effort was only a down payment on the work required, she balked. My wheedling and pleading were rebuffed; it was only when I taunted her with my success—“So you admit that men are superior? That I am better than you?”—that she mulishly returned to her studies.

It was hardly a day later that she had her breakthrough. We had tried a number of texts, but it was only when she discovered romance novels that she found something enticing. We read together, huddled over one of the screen readers, with me reading a portion and then leaving her to finish.

It was getting late, past time to return her to her quarters.

“Danura,” I said, “we need to get you back.”

“Just a moment,” she told me distractedly.

“If you’re too late, it will be noticed,” I said, quoting the words she’d said to me on an earlier occasion when she’d found the going too difficult.

“Shh, Golrina is about to give birth,” Danura said, bending farther over the table and peering intently at the words as she scrolled to the next page.

I sat back, a smile upon my lips. I knew that she had got it, that the love of reading had lodged in her heart. I recalled the days of my youth when I first discovered Jules Verne and, later, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I was surprised to realize that I was now living a life far more interesting—and dangerous—than John Carter of Mars.

I leaned forward again, to discover that Danura had paused, rubbing away the tears that were streaming down her face. She noticed me and buried her head in my shoulder, crying, “She lost the baby, she lost the baby!”

I comforted her as best I could and reminded her that it was a work of fiction, that it wasn’t real.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s real; it matters what I feel!” she scolded me. A yawn escaped her and she looked back at the book, clearly torn between reading more and her need for sleep.

“It will be there tomorrow,” I told her, recalling fondly my mother’s words to me as a child: “The print won’t fade.”

She allowed herself to be led back to her room. There she got ready for bed in her usual unselfconscious manner, being no more concerned with her modesty than if I had been a piece of furniture. I had grown used to it, though it still made me uncomfortable. She knew it, and it amused her.

Finally she crawled under her sheets, and I made ready to go. But she stopped me with a raised hand, patting the side of her bed.

“You’ve never told me of your homeworld, Tangor,” she said now, muzzily.

“There’s not much to tell,” I said evasively. I had made it clear to her that Argos heard every word said in the domes and was listening with special care to the words
I
said—as I’d made it a point of asking him to do so (saying it was to be certain that he sent aid if I asked for it but also allowing me to verify my suspicion as to his eavesdropping abilities).

“Were there many women for you?” she asked now. “Were you a lusty lover in that other body?”

We had been in each other’s close company for such a while now that I had little difficulty grasping the import of her question.

“They are thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of years gone,” I replied. In truth, there had only been one brief romance before the rigors of war restricted my movements—and it had been a chaste thing with all the heat of first love.

Yamoda was not much different, although I got to see more of her than I had of Veronica Smith.

“But you still have your memories,” Danura said, reaching out from under her blankets to pat my leg. “In that way you are like a book. So tell me your tale.”

I toyed with denying her but then decided it would be a harmless diversion and give nothing away to Argos that I would regret. So I told her about Veronica—“Ronnie”—and how we’d met in high school and how we’d danced at the Fall Ball. And then there’d been Pearl Harbor, and I’d signed up with the Army Air Corps and had been sent to fight the Germans.

I kept my voice in a low monotone and, soon enough, was rewarded by the sound of Danura’s gentle snores. Gently I put her hand back under the sheets and leaned over to kiss her forehead good night.

She said nothing the next evening when I came for her, instead prattling on about the book and being certain that I had not read ahead of her. She finished that book and three others, even as I introduced her to the technical manuals. Those bored her and she dismissed them with a wave.

However, I had planned for that, leaving her to read while I worked on several projects for Argos—and myself.

When she was ready for a break, I whistled up one of the more imposing worker machines and then whistled for another. I made the right hand signal for the first mount to descend and climbed aboard.

“You can
ride
them?” Danura cried in delighted surprise. “Show me!”

“It’s in the manual,” I told her. “I’ve keyed it for your screen, all you have to do is read it.”

“But I want to ride
now!
” she said imperiously.

“So read quickly,” I told her. “I’m hungry and I’m going to eat at the High Commissary—they’ve made your favorite soup.”

“What?” Danura said. She stamped her foot. “You can’t leave me here!”

I smiled at her and rolled the controls on my worker machine. Noiselessly we turned outside around her and the worker I’d summoned for her and then sped off into the distance even as she wailed angrily, “Tangor!”

Hunger, as always, proved an excellent motivator, and she was only twenty-five minutes late in joining me. She dismounted, her face flushed with excitement and her hair akimbo from the wind that her flying worker machine had generated in its speed.

On the ground, she rushed up to me, fists raised, and pummeled my chest. “That’s for leaving me!” she cried, and then leaned up and forward to plant a kiss on my lips. “And that’s for making me learn.”

I wrapped my arms around her and gave her a tight hug before turning to the tables. “I’ve kept the soup warm.”

“I knew you would,” she purred, retaining one of my hands and leading us to the waiting table. A server machine whisked out our hot food and poured drinks.

We spent little time talking while we ate, but our eyes spoke volumes.

Over the next few days, Danura perfected her grasp of reading and her grasp of technical work. She became engrossed in the most intriguing tasks and insisted on treating Argos like a mere male which seemed to cause the machine some confusion which pleased me quite a lot, particularly as I was busy with my own plans.

So when Danura became engrossed in one of her projects, I engaged in some of mine.

As I’ve said, Argos is an intelligent machine and runs the three domes of Tonos. Its ability to track parts and explain repairs was phenomenal, but it was just as stupid as any supply officer when it came to preventing a little creative accounting, as my old tech sergeant used to say with me, winking before presenting me with a brand-new engine he just “happened” to locate.

I knew that Argos would track items, because it was a requirement of its operations, but I also knew that, however intelligent Argos was, it was originally designed and built by humans—Tonosians over three thousand years ago—and so subject to the same industrial myopia that afflicted all such massive engineering tasks.

Argos, in short, couldn’t see the trees for the forest. I soon learned exactly how it maintained track of its inventory—it used the simple assumption that all powered machinery needed powerpacks or batteries of some kind and so rigged special trackers in those.

Once learned, it was not difficult to become an expert on “troubleshooting” problems with power supplies, some of which invariably were deemed too decrepit to spare. In fact, most of them were nothing of the sort; I merely declared them so when, in fact, I had removed the tracking circuitry.